Striking a balance
Organizations should look at not only striking a balance between open-source and commercial products, but also between low- and high-end servers, according to research firm Gartner Inc., Stamford, Conn. This way, they will get better value for their money. Rather than standardize on a single-platform application server architecture, Gartner recommends using a low-end server for less-demanding, user-facing applications and a high-end application server for transaction-heavy applications.
Gartner reports that many companies have been paying big bucks for products that have more capacity than they actually need, which the firm chalks up to a lack of architectural planning and 'the blind adoption of vendor-promoted technology.' Gartner divides application servers into two groups: low-end, which support servlets and JSPs, but typically not EJBs; and high-end, which typically support EJBs and Java messaging, and handle large transaction volumes.
This high-end/low-end distinction was what I was trying to sort out in Chicago a few months ago, trying to establish that we aren't trying to do big transaction volumes at a district leve, but more "user-facing" stuff.
